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James Baldwin

In Praise of Books.

The choice of books is not the least part of the duty of a scholar. If he would become a man, and worthy to deal with manlike things, he must read only the bravest and noblest books,—books forged at the heart and fashioned by the intellect of a godlike man.—January Searle.

THE most important question for you to ask yourself, be you teacher or scholar, is this: What books shall I read? For him who has inclination to read, there is no dearth of reading matter, and it is obtainable almost for the asking. Books are in a manner thrust upon you almost daily. Shall you read without discrimination whatever comes most readily to hand? As well say that you will accept as a friend and companion every man whom you meet on the street. Shall you read even every good book that comes in your way, simply because it is harmless and interesting? It is not every harmless book, nor indeed every good book, that will make your mind the richer for the reading of it. Never, perhaps, has the right choice of books been more difficult than at present; and never did it behoove more strongly both teachers and scholars to look well to the character of that which they read.

First, then, let us consider what books we are to avoid. All will agree that those which are really and absolutely bad should be shunned as we shun a pestilence. In these last years of the nineteenth century there is no more prolific cause of evil than bad books. There are many books so utterly vile that there is no mistaking their character, and no question as to whether they should be avoided. There are others which are a thousand-fold more dangerous because they come to us disguised,—“wolves in sheep’s clothing,”—affecting a character of harmlessness, if not of sanctity. I have heard those who ought to know better, laugh at the silly jokes of a very silly book, and offer by way of excuse that there was nothing very bad in it. I have heard teachers recommend to their pupils reading matter which, to say the least, was of a very doubtful character. Now, the only excuse that can be offered in such cases is ignorance,—“I didn’t know there was any harm in the book.” But the teacher who through ignorance poisons the moral character and checks the mental growth of his pupils is as guilty of criminal carelessness as the druggist’s clerk who by mistake sells arsenic for quinine. Step down and out of that responsible position which you are in no wise qualified to fill! The direction of the pupils’ habits of reading, the choice of reading matter for them, is by no means the least of the teacher’s duties.

The elder Pliny, eighteen hundred years ago, was accustomed to say that no book was so bad but that some part of it might be read with profit. This may have been true in Pliny’s time; but it is very far from correct now-a-days. A large number of books, and many which attain an immense circulation, are but the embodiment of evil from beginning to end; others, although not absolutely and aggressively bad, contain not a single line that can be read with profit.

What are the sure criterions of a bad book? There is no better authority on this subject than the Rev. Robert Collyer. He says: “If when I read a book about God, I find that it has put Him farther from me; or about man, that it has put me farther from him; or about this universe, that it has shaken down upon it a new look of desolation, turning a green field into a wild moor; or about life, that it has made it seem a little less worth living, on all accounts, than it was; or about moral principles, that they are not quite so clear and strong as they were when this author began to talk;—then I know that on any of these five cardinal things in the life of man,—his relations to God, to his fellows, to the world about him, and the world within him, and the great principles on which all things stable centre,—that, for me, is a bad book. It may chime in with some lurking appetite in my own nature, and so seem to be as sweet as honey to my taste; but it comes to bitter, bad results. It may be food for another; I can say nothing to that. He may be a pine while I am a palm. I only know this, that in these great first things, if the book I read shall touch them at all, it shall touch them to my profit or I will not read it. Right and wrong shall grow more clear; life in and about me more divine; I shall come nearer to my fellows, and God nearer to me, or the thing is a poison. Faust, or Calvin, or Carlyle, if any one of these cardinal things is the grain and the grist of the book, and that is what it comes to when I read it, I am being drugged and poisoned; and the sooner I know it the better. I want bread, and meat, and milk, not brandy, or opium, or hasheesh.”

And Robert Southey, the poet, expresses nearly the same thing: “Young readers,—you whose hearts are open, whose understandings are not yet hardened, and whose feelings are not yet exhausted nor encrusted with the world,—take from me a better rule than any professors of criticism will teach you! Would you know whether the tendency of a book is good or evil, examine in what state of mind you lay it down. Has it induced you to suspect that what you have been accustomed to think unlawful may after all be innocent, and that may be harmless which you have hitherto been taught to think dangerous? Has it tended to make you dissatisfied and impatient under the control of others, and disposed you to relax in that self-government without which both the laws of God and man tell us there can be no virtue, and, consequently, no happiness? Has it attempted to abate your admiration and reverence for what is great and good, and to diminish in you the love of your country and your fellow-creatures? Has it addressed itself to your pride, your vanity, your selfishness, or any other of your evil propensities? Has it defiled the imagination with what is loathsome, and shocked the heart with what is monstrous? Has it disturbed the sense of right and wrong which the Creator has implanted in the human soul? If so, if you are conscious of any or all of these effects, or if, having escaped from all, you have felt that such were the effects it was intended to produce, throw the book in the fire, whatever name it may bear in the titlepage! Throw it in the fire, young man, though it should have been the gift of a friend; young lady, away with the whole set, though it should be the prominent furniture of a rosewood bookcase.”

“It is the case with literature as with life,” says Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher. “Wherever we turn we come upon the incorrigible mob of humankind, whose name is Legion, swarming everywhere, damaging everything, as flies in summer. Hence the multiplicity of bad books, those exuberant weeds of literature which choke the true corn. Such books rob the public of time, money, and attention, which ought properly to belong to good literature and noble aims; and they are written with a view merely to make money or occupation. They are therefore not merely useless, but injurious. Nine tenths of our current literature has no other end but to inveigle a thaler or two out of the public pocket, for which purpose author, publisher, and printer are leagued together.... Of bad books we can never read too little; of the good, never too much. The bad are intellectual poison, and undermine the understanding.”

From Thomas Carlyle’s inaugural address at Edinburgh on the occasion of his installation as rector of the University in 1866, I quote the following potent passage: “I do not know whether it has been sufficiently brought home to you that there are two kinds of books. When a man is reading on any kind of subject, in most departments of books,—in all books, if you take it in a wide sense,—he will find that there is a division into good books and bad books: everywhere a good kind of a book and a bad kind of a book. I am not to assume that you are unacquainted or ill-acquainted with this plain fact; but I may remind you that it is becoming a very important consideration in our day.... There is a number, a frightfully increasing number, of books that are decidedly, to the readers of them, not useful. But an ingenious reader will learn, also, that a certain number of books were written by a supremely noble kind of people; not a very great number of books, but still a number fit to occupy all your reading industry, do adhere more or less to that side of things. In short, as I have written it down somewhere else, I conceive that books are like men’s souls, divided into sheep and goats. Some few are going up, and carrying us up, heavenward; calculated, I mean, to be of priceless advantage in teaching,—in forwarding the teaching of all generations. Others, a frightful multitude, are going down, down; doing ever the more and the wider and the wilder mischief. Keep a strict eye on that latter class of books, my young friends!”

Speaking of those books whose inward character and influence it is hard at first to discern, John Ruskin says: “Avoid especially that class of literature which has a knowing tone; it is the most poisonous of all. Every good book, or piece of book, is full of admiration and awe: it may contain firm assertion or stern satire, but it never sneers coldly, nor asserts haughtily; and it always leads you to reverence or love something with your whole heart. It is not always easy to distinguish the satire of the venomous race of books from the satire of the noble and pure ones; but, in general, you may notice that the cold-blooded Crustacean and Batrachian books will sneer at sentiment, and the warm-blooded, human books at sin.... Much of the literature of the present day, though good to be read by persons of ripe age, has a tendency to agitate rather than confirm, and leaves its readers too frequently in a helpless or hopeless indignation, the worst possible state into which the mind of youth can be thrown. It may, indeed, become necessary for you, as you advance in life, to set your hand to things that need to be altered in the world, or apply your heart chiefly to what must be pitied in it, or condemned; but for a young person the safest temper is one of reverence, and the safest place one of obscurity. Certainly at present, and perhaps through all your life, your teachers are wisest when they make you content in quiet virtue; and that literature and art are best for you which point out, in common life and familiar things, the objects for hopeful labor and for humble love.”

There would be fewer bad books in the world if readers were properly informed and warned of their character; and we may believe that the really vicious books would soon cease to exist if their makers and publishers were popularly regarded with the same detestation as other corrupters of the public morals. “He who has published an injurious book,” says Robert South, “sins, as it were in his very grave; corrupts others while he is rotting himself.” Addison says much the same thing: “Writers of great talents, who employ their parts in propagating immorality, and seasoning vicious sentiments with wit and humor, are to be looked upon as the pests of society and the enemies of mankind. They leave books behind them to scatter infection and destroy their posterity. They act the counterparts of a Confucius or a Socrates, and seem to have been sent into the world to deprave human nature, and sink it into the condition of brutality.”

And William Cobbett is still more severe in his denunciation. In his “Advice to Young Men,” he says: “I hope that your taste will keep you aloof from the writings of those detestable villains who employ the powers of their mind in debauching the minds of others, or in endeavors to do it. They present their poison in such captivating forms that it requires great virtue and resolution to withstand their temptations; and they have, perhaps, done a thousand times as much mischief in the world as all the infidels and atheists put together. These men ought to be held in universal abhorrence, and never spoken of but with execration.”

But the shunning of bad books is only one of the problems presented to us in the choice of our reading. In the great multitude of really good and valuable books, how shall we choose those which are of the most vital importance to us to know? The universal habit of desultory reading—reading simply to be entertained—is a habit not to be indulged in, nor encouraged, by scholars or by those who aspire to the station of teachers. There are perhaps a score of books which should be read and studied by every one who claims the title of reader; but, aside from these, each person should determine, through a process of rigid self-examination, what course of reading and what books are likely to produce the most profitable results to him. Find out, if possible, what is your special bent of mind. What line of inquiry or investigation is the most congenial to your taste or mental capacity? Having determined this question, let your reading all centre upon that topic of study which you have made your own,—let it be Literature, Science, History, Art, or any of the innumerable subdivisions of these subjects. In other words, choose a specialty, and follow it with an eye single to it alone.

Says Frederic Harrison: “Every book that we take up without a purpose is an opportunity lost of taking up a book with a purpose; every bit of stray information which we cram into our heads without any sense of its importance is for the most part a bit of the most useful information driven out of our heads and choked off from our minds.... We know that books differ in value as much as diamonds differ from the sand on the sea-shore, as much as our living friend differs from a dead rat. We know that much in the myriad-peopled world of books—very much in all kinds—is trivial, enervating, inane, even noxious. And thus, where we have infinite opportunities of wasting our effort to no end, of fatiguing our minds without enriching them, of clogging the spirit without satisfying it, there, I cannot but think, the very infinity of opportunities is robbing us of the actual power of using them.... To know anything that turns up is, in the infinity of knowledge, to know nothing. To read the first book we come across, in the wilderness of books, is to learn nothing. To turn over the pages of ten thousand volumes is to be practically indifferent to all that is good.”

“It is of paramount importance,” says Schopenhauer, “to acquire the art not to read; in other words, of not reading such books as occupy the public mind, or even those which make a noise in the world, and reach several editions in their first and last year of existence. We should recollect that he who writes for fools finds an enormous audience, and we should devote the ever scant leisure of our circumscribed existence to the master-spirits of all ages and nations, those who tower over humanity, and whom the voice of Fame proclaims: only such writers cultivate and instruct us.”

And John Ruskin offers the following pertinent advice to beginners: “It is of the greatest importance to you, not only for art’s sake, but for all kinds of sake, in these days of book deluge, to keep out of the salt swamps of literature, and live on a little rocky island of your own, with a spring and a lake in it, pure and good. I cannot, of course, suggest the choice of your library to you, for every several mind needs different books; but there are some books which we all need, and assuredly, if you read Homer, Plato, Æschylus, Herodotus, Dante, Shakspeare, and Spenser as much as you ought, you will not require wide enlargement of your shelves to right and left of them for purposes of perpetual study. Among modern books, avoid generally magazine and review literature. Sometimes it may contain a useful abridgment or a wholesome piece of criticism; but the chances are ten to one it will either waste your time or mislead you. If you want to understand any subject whatever, read the best book upon it you can hear of; not a review of the book.... A common book will often give you much amusement, but it is only a noble book which will give you dear friends.”

If any of us could recall the time which we have spent in desultory and profitless reading, and devote it now faithfully to the prosecution of that special line of study which ought, long ago, to have been chosen, how largely we might add to our fund of useful knowledge, and how grandly we might increase our intellectual stature! “And again,” remarks James Herbert Morse, “if I could recover the hours idly given to the newspaper, not for my own gratification, but solely for my neighbor at the breakfast-table, I could compass a solid course of English and American history, get at the antecedents of political parties in the two countries, and give the reasons for the existence of Gladstone and Parnell, of Blaine and Edmunds, in modern politics—and there is undoubtedly a reason for them all. Two columns a day in the newspapers—which I could easily have spared, for they were given mainly to murder-trials and the search for corpses, or to the romance of the reporter concerning the same—have during the last ten years absorbed just about the time I might have spent in reading a very respectable course in history,—one embracing, say, Curtius and Grote for Greece, Mommsen, Merivale, and Gibbon for Rome, Macaulay and Green for my roots in Saxondom, Bancroft, Hildreth, and Palfrey for the ancestral tree in America, together with a very notable excursion into Spain and Holland with Motley and Prescott,—a course which I consider very desirable, and one which should set up a man of middle age very fairly in historical knowledge. I am sure I could have saved this amount out of any ten years of my newspaper reading alone, without cutting off any portion of that really valuable contribution for which the daily paper is to be honored, and which would be needed to make me an intelligent man in the history of my own times.”8

It is not necessary that, in selecting a library or in choosing what you will read, you should have many books at your disposal. A few books, well chosen and carefully read, will be of infinitely more value to you than any miscellaneous collection, however large. It is possible for “the man of one book” to be better equipped in knowledge and literary attainments than he whose shelves are loaded with all the fashionable literature of the day. If your means will not permit you the luxury of a library, buy one book, or a few books, chosen with special reference to the line of reading which you have determined upon. Let no honey-mouthed book-agent persuade you to buy of his wares, unless they bear exactly upon your specialty. You cannot afford to waste money on mere catchpenny or machine publications, whose only recommendation is that they are harmless and that they sell well. That man is to be envied who can say, “I have a library of fifty or of a hundred volumes, all relating to my chosen line of thought, and not a single inferior or worthless volume among them.”

I have before me a list of books,—“books fashioned by the intellect of godlike men,”—books which every person who aspires to the rank of teacher or scholar should regard as his inheritance from the master-minds of the ages. If you know these books—or some of them—you know much of that which is best in the great world of letters. You cannot afford to live in ignorance of them.

Plato’s Dialogues (Jowett’s translation).

The Orations of Demosthenes on the Crown.

Bacon’s Essays.

Burke’s Orations and Political Essays.

Macaulay’s Essays.

Carlyle’s Essays.

Webster’s Select Speeches.

Emerson’s Essays.

The Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb.

Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott.

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens.

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray.

Hypatia, by Charles Kingsley.

The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot.

The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Sketch Book, by Washington Irving.

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo.

Wilhelm Meister, by Goethe (Carlyle’s trans.).

Don Quixote, by Cervantes.

Homer’s Iliad (Derby’s or Chapman’s translation).

Homer’s Odyssey (Bryant’s translation).

Dante’s Divina Commedia (Longfellow’s trans.).

Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Shakspeare’s Works.

Mrs. Browning’s Poems.

Longfellow’s Poetical Works.

Goethe’s Faust (Bayard Taylor’s translation).

I have named but twenty-five authors; but each of these, in his own line of thought and endeavor, stands first in the long roll of immortals. When you have the opportunity to make the acquaintance of such as these, will you waste your time with writers whom you would be ashamed to number among your personal friends? “Will you go and gossip with your housemaid or your stable boy, when you may talk with kings and queens, while this eternal court is open to you, with its society wide as the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, the mighty, of every place and time? Into that you may enter always; in that you may take fellowship and rank according to your wish; from that, once entered into it, you can never be outcast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy of companionship there, your inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you strive to take high place in the society of the living, measured, as to all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to take in this company of the dead.”9

HAVING chosen the books which are to be our friends and counsellors, the next question to be considered is, How shall we use them? Shall we read them through as hastily as possible, believing that the more we read, the more learned we are? Or shall we not derive more profit by reading slowly, and by making the subject-matter of each book thoroughly our own? I do not believe that any general rule can be given with reference to this matter. Some readers will take in a page at a glance, and will more thoroughly master a book in a week than others could possibly master it in six months. It required Frederick W. Robertson half a year to read a small manual of chemistry, and thoroughly to digest its contents. Miss Martineau and Auguste Comte were remarkably slow readers; but then, that which they read “lay fructifying, and came out a living tree with leaves and fruit.” Yet it does not follow that the same rule should apply to readers of every grade of genius.

It is generally better to read by subjects, to learn what different writers have thought and said concerning that matter of which you are making a special study. Not many books are to be read hastily through. “A person who was a very great reader and hard thinker,” says Bishop Thirlwall, “once told me that he never took up a book except with the view of making himself master of some subject which he was studying, and that while he was so engaged he made all his reading converge to that point. In this way he might read parts of many books, but not a single one from ‘end to end.’ This I take to be an excellent method of study, but one which implies the command of many books as well as of much leisure.”

Seneca, the old Roman teacher, says: “Definite reading is profitable; miscellaneous reading is pleasant.... The reading of many authors and of all kinds of works has in it something vague and unstable.”

Says Quintilian: “Every good writer is to be read, and diligently; and when the volume is finished, it is to be gone through again from the beginning.”

Martin Luther, in his “Table Talk,” says: “All who would study with advantage in any art whatsoever ought to betake themselves to the reading of some sure and certain books oftentimes over; for to read many books produceth confusion rather than learning, like as those who dwell everywhere are not anywhere at home.”

“Reading,” says Locke the philosopher, “furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what are read over. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.”

“Much reading,” says Dr. Robert South, “is like much eating,—wholly useless without digestion.”

“Desultory reading,” writes Julius C. Hare, “is indeed very mischievous, by fostering habits of loose, discontinuous thought, by turning the memory into a common sewer for rubbish of all thoughts to flow through, and by relaxing the power of attention, which of all our faculties most needs care, and is most improved by it. But a well-regulated course of study will no more weaken the mind than hard exercise will weaken the body; nor will a strong understanding be weighed down by its knowledge, any more than oak is by its leaves or than Samson was by his locks. He whose sinews are drained by his hair must already be a weakling.”10

Says Thomas Carlyle: “Learn to be good readers,—which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in,—a real, not an imaginary,—and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in. The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut out for him in the world, and does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,—honest work, which you intend getting done.”

Says Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The best rule of reading will be a method from nature, and not a mechanical one of hours and pages. It holds each student to a pursuit of his native aim, instead of a desultory miscellany. Let him read what is proper to him, and not waste his memory on a crowd of mediocrities. ... The three practical rules which I have to offer are: 1. Never read any book that is not a year old. 2. Never read any but famed books. 3. Never read any but what you like; or, in Shakspeare’s phrase,—

“Let us read good works often over,” says another writer.12 “Some skip from volume to volume, touching on all points, resting on none. We hold, on the contrary, that if a book be worth reading once, it is worth reading twice, and that if it stands a second reading, it may stand a third. This, indeed, is one great test of the excellence of books. Many books require to be read more than once, in order to be seen in their proper colors and latent glories, and dim-discovered truths will by-and-by disclose themselves.... Again, let us read thoughtfully; this is a great secret in the right use of books. Not lazily, to mumble, like the dogs in the siege of Corinth, as dead bones, the words of the author,—not slavishly to assent to his every word, and cry Amen to his every conclusion,—not to read him as an officer his general’s orders, but to read him with suspicion, with inquiry, with a free exercise of your own faculties, with the admiration of intelligence, and not with the wonder of ignorance,—that is the proper and profitable way of reading the great authors of your native tongue.”

Says Sir Arthur Helps: “There is another view of reading which, though it is obvious enough, is seldom taken, I imagine, or at least acted upon; and that is, that in the course of our reading we should lay up in our minds a store of goodly thoughts in well-wrought words, which should be a living treasure of knowledge always with us, and from which, at various times and amidst all the shifting of circumstances, we might be sure of drawing some comfort, guidance, and sympathy.... In any work that is worth carefully reading, there is generally something that is worth remembering accurately. A man whose mind is enriched with the best sayings of his own country is a more independent man, walks the streets in a town or the lanes in the country with far more delight than he otherwise would have, and is taught by wise observers of man and nature to examine for himself. Sancho Panza, with his proverbs, is a great deal better than he would have been without them; and I contend that a man has something in himself to meet troubles and difficulties, small or great, who has stored in his mind some of the best things which have been said about troubles and difficulties.”13

And John Ruskin: “No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable until it has been read, and reread, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it, as a soldier can seize the weapons he needs in an armory, or a housewife bring the spice she needs from her store.”

“I am not at all afraid,” says Matthew Browne, “of urging overmuch the propriety of frequent, very frequent, reading of the same book. The book remains the same, but the reader changes; and the value of reading lies in the collision of minds. It may be taken for granted that no conceivable amount of reading could ever put me into the position with respect to his book—I mean as to intelligence only—in which the author strove to place me. I may read him a hundred times, and not catch the precise right point of view; and may read him a hundred and one times, and approach it the hundred and first. The driest and hardest book that ever was, contains an interest over and above what can be picked out of it, and laid, so to speak, on the table. It is interesting as my friend is interesting; it is a problem which invites me to closer knowledge, and that usually means better liking. He must be a poor friend that we only care to see once or twice, and then forget.”14

“The great secret of reading consists in this,” says Charles F. Richardson, “that it does not matter so much what we read, or how we read it, as what we think and how we think it. Reading is only the fuel; and, the mind once on fire, any and all material will feed the flame, provided only it have any combustible matter in it. And we cannot tell from what quarter the next material will come. The thought we need, the facts we are in search of, may make their appearance in the corner of the newspaper, or in some forgotten volume long ago consigned to dust and oblivion.... The mind that is not awake and alive will find a library a barren wilderness. Now, gather up the scraps and fragments of thought on whatever subject you may be studying,—for of course by a note-book I do not mean a mere receptacle for odds and ends, a literary dust-bin,—but acquire the habit of gathering everything whenever and wherever you find it, that belongs in your line or lines of study, and you will be surprised to see how such fragments will arrange themselves into an orderly whole by the very organizing power of your own thinking, acting in a definite direction. This is a true process of self-education; but you see it is no mechanical process of mere aggregation. It requires activity of thought; but without that, what is any reading but mere passive amusement? And it requires method. I have myself a sort of literary book-keeping. I post my literary accounts, bringing together in proper groups the fruits of much casual reading.”

Edward Gibbon the historian tells us that a taste for books was the pleasure and glory of his life. “Let us read with method,” he says, “and propose to ourselves an end to what our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.”

Among practical suggestions to those who would read for profit, I have found nothing more pertinent than the following from the posthumous papers of Bryan Waller Procter: “Always read the preface to a book. It places you on vantage ground, and enables you to survey more completely the book itself. You frequently also discover the character of the author from the preface. You see his aims, perhaps his prejudices. You see the point of view from which he takes his pictures, the rocks and impediments which he himself beholds, and you steer accordingly.... Understand every word you read; if possible, every allusion of the author,—if practicable, while you are reading; if not, make search and inquiry as soon as may be afterward. Have a dictionary near you when you read; and when you read a book of travels, always read with a map of the country at hand. Without a map the information is vague and transitory.... After having read as much as your mind will easily retain, sum up what you have read,—endeavor to place in view the portion or subject that has formed your morning’s study; and then reckon up (as you would reckon up a sum) the facts or items of knowledge that you have gained. It generally happens that the amount of three or four hours’ reading may be reduced to and concentrated in half a dozen propositions. These are your gains,—these are the facts or opinions that you have acquired. You may investigate the truth of them hereafter. Although I think that one’s general reading should extend over many subjects, yet for serious study we should confine ourselves to some branch of literature or science. Otherwise the mind becomes confused and enfeebled, and the thoughts, dissipated on many things, will settle profitably on none. A man whose duration of life is limited, and whose powers are limited also, should not aim at all things, but should content himself with a few. By such means he may master one, and become tolerably familiar perhaps with two or three arts or sciences. He may indeed even make valuable contributions to them. Without this economy of labor, he cannot produce any complete work, nor can he exhaust any subject.”

Every scholar is familiar with Lord Bacon’s classification of books,—some “to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” Coleridge’s classification of the various kinds of readers is perhaps not quite so well known. He said that some readers are like jelly-bags,—they let pass away all that is pure and good, and retain only what is impure and refuse. Another class he typified by a sponge; these are they whose minds suck all up, and give it back again, only a little dirtier. Others, again, he likened to an hour-glass, and their reading to the sand which runs in and out, and leaves no trace behind. And still others he compared to the slave in the Golconda mines, who retains the gold and the gem, and casts aside the dust and the dross. Charles C. Colton, the author of “Lacon,” says there are three kinds of readers: first, those who read to think,—and they are rare; second, those who read to write,—and they are common; third, those who read to talk,—and they form the great majority. And Goethe, the greatest name in German literature, makes still a different classification: some readers, he tells us, enjoy without judgment; others judge without enjoyment; and some there are who judge while they enjoy, and enjoy while they judge.

In these days, when, so far as reading-matter is concerned, we are overburdened with an embarrassment of riches, we cannot afford to read, even in the books which we have chosen as ours, those things which have no relationship to our studies, which do not concern us, and which are sure to be forgotten as soon as read. The art of reading, says Philip Gilbert Hamerton in his admirable essay on “The Intellectual Life,” “is to skip judiciously. The art is to skip all that does not concern us, whilst missing nothing that we really need. No external guidance can teach this; for nobody but ourselves can guess what the needs of our intellect may be. But let us select with decisive firmness, independently of other people’s advice, independently of the authority of custom.” And Charles F. Richardson, referring to the same subject, remarks: “The art of skipping is, in a word, the art of noting and shunning that which is bad, or frivolous, or misleading, or unsuitable for one’s individual needs. If you are convinced that the book or the chapter is bad, you cannot drop it too quickly. If it is simply idle and foolish, put it away on that account,—unless you are properly seeking amusement from idleness and frivolity. If it is something deceitful and disingenuous, your task is not so easy; but your conscience will give you warning, and the sharp examination which should follow will tell you that you are in poor literary company.”

A LIBRARY is the scholar’s workshop. To the teacher or professional man, a collection of good books is as necessary as a kit of tools to a carpenter. And yet I am aware that many persons are engaged in teaching, who have neither a library of their own, nor access to any other collection of books suitable to their use. There are others who, having every opportunity to secure the best of books,—with a public library near at hand offering them the free use of works most valuable to them,—yet make no effort to profit by these advantages. They care nothing for any books save the text-books indispensable to their profession, and for these only so far as necessity obliges them to do so. The libraries of many persons calling themselves teachers consist solely of school-books, many of which have been presented them by accommodating book-agents, “for examination with a view to introduction.” And yet we hear such teachers talk learnedly about the introduction of English literature into the common schools of the country, and the necessity of cultivating among the children a wholesome love and taste for reading. If inquiry were made, we might discover that by a study of English literature these teachers understand some memoriter exercises in Shaw’s “Manual” or Brooke’s “Primer,” and that, as to good reading, some there are who are entertained more deeply by Peck’s “Bad Boy” than by Shakspeare’s “Merchant of Venice.” Talk not about directing and cultivating the reading-tastes of your pupils until you have successfully directed and cultivated your own! And the first step towards doing this is the selection and purchase of a library for yourself, which shall be all your own. A very few books will do, if they are of the right kind; and they must be yours. A borrowed book is but a cheap pleasure, an unappreciated and unsatisfactory tool. To know the true value of books, and to derive any satisfactory benefit from them, you must first feel the sweet delight of buying them,—you must know the preciousness of possession.

You plead poverty,—the insufficiency of your salary? But do you not spend for other things, entirely unnecessary, much more every year than the cost of a few books? The immediate outlay need not be large, the returns which you will realize will be great in proportion to your good judgment and earnestness. Not only will the possession of a good library add to your means of enjoyment and increase your capacity for doing good, it may, if you are worldly-minded,—and we all are,—put you in the way of occupying a more desirable position and earning a more satisfactory reward for your labors.

There are two kinds of books that you will need in your library: first, those which are purely professional, and are in the strictest sense the tools of your craft; second, those which belong to your chosen department of literature, and are to be regarded as your friends, companions, and counsellors. I cannot, of course, dictate to you what these books shall be. The lists given in the chapters which follow this are designed simply as suggestive aids. But in a library of fifty or even thirty well-chosen volumes you may possess infinite riches, and means for a lifetime of enjoyment; while, on the other hand, if your selection is injudicious, you may expend thousands of dollars for a collection of the odds and ends of literature, which will be only an incumbrance and a hindrance to you.

“I would urge upon every young man, as the beginning of his due and wise provision for his household,” says John Ruskin, “to obtain as soon as he can, by the severest economy, a restricted, serviceable, and steadily—however slowly—increasing series of books for use through life; making his little library, of all the furniture in his room, the most studied and decorative piece; every volume having its assigned place, like a little statue in its niche, and one of the earliest and strictest lessons to the children of the house being how to turn the pages of their own literary possessions lightly and deliberately, with no chance of tearing or dog’s-ears.”

And Henry Ward Beecher emphasizes the same thing, remarking that, among the early ambitions to be excited in clerks, workmen, journeymen, and indeed among all that are struggling up in life from nothing to something, the most important is that of forming and continually adding to a library of good books. “A little library, growing larger every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life.”

“How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?” asks another enthusiastic lover of books, already quoted. “If a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad,—a bibliomaniac. But you never call any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their books.... We talk of food for the mind, as of food for the body: now, a good book contains such food inexhaustibly; it is a provision for life, and for the best of us; yet how long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it! Though there have been men who have pinched their stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, whose libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end than most men’s dinners are. We are few of us put to such trial, and more the pity: for, indeed, a precious thing is all the more precious to us if it has been won by work or economy; and if public libraries were half as costly as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what bracelets do, even foolish men and women might sometimes suspect there was good in reading, as well as in munching and sparkling; whereas the very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.”

“The truest owner of a library,” says the author of “Hesperides,” “is he who has bought each book for the love he bears to it,—who is happy and content to say, ‘Here are my jewels, my choicest material possessions!’—who is proud to crown such assertion thus: ‘I am content that this library shall represent the use of the talents given me by Heaven!’ That man’s library, though not commensurate with his love for books, will demonstrate what he has been able to accomplish with his resources; it will denote economy of living, eagerness to possess the particles that compose his library, and quick watchfulness to seize them when means and opportunities serve. Such a man has built a temple, of which each brick has been the subject of curious and acute intelligent examination and appreciation before it has been placed in the sacred building.”

“Every man should have a library!” exclaims William Axon. “The works of the grandest masters of literature may now be procured at prices that place them within the reach almost of the very poorest, and we may all put Parnassian singing-birds into our chambers to cheer us with the sweetness of their songs. And when we have got our little library we may look proudly at Shakspeare and Bacon and Bunyan, as they stand in our bookcase with other noble spirits, and one or two of whom the world knows nothing, but whose worth we have often tested. These may cheer and enlighten us, may inspire us with higher aims and aspirations, may make us, if we use them rightly, wiser and better men.”18

Good old George Dyer, the friend of the poet Southey, as learned as he was benevolent, was wont to say: “Libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed, may bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use.” “Any library is an attraction,” says the venerable A. Bronson Alcott; and Victor Hugo writes—

John Bright, the great English statesman and reformer, in a speech at the opening of the Birmingham Free Library a short time ago, remarked: “You may have in a house costly pictures and costly ornaments, and a great variety of decoration; yet, so far as my judgment goes, I would prefer to have one comfortable room well stocked with books to all you can give me in the way of decoration which the highest art can supply. The only subject of lamentation is—one feels that always, I think, in the presence of a library—that life is too short, and I am afraid I must say also that our industry is so far deficient that we seem to have no hope of a full enjoyment of the ample repast that is spread before us. In the houses of the humble a little library, in my opinion, is a most precious possession.”

Jean Paul Richter, it is said, was always melancholy in a large library, because it reminded him of his ignorance.

“A library may be regarded as the solemn chamber in which a man can take counsel of all that have been wise and great and good and glorious amongst the men that have gone before him,” said George Dawson, also at Birmingham. “If we come down for a moment and look at the bare and immediate utilities of a library, we find that here a man gets himself ready for his calling, arms himself for his profession, finds out the facts that are to determine his trade, prepares himself for his examination. The utilities of it are endless and priceless. It is, too, a place of pastime; for man has no amusement more innocent, more sweet, more gracious, more elevating, and more fortifying than he can find in a library. If he be fond of books, his fondness will discipline him as well as amuse him.... A library is the strengthener of all that is great in life, and the repeller of what is petty and mean; and half the gossip of society would perish if the books that are truly worth reading were read.... When we look through the houses of a large part of the middle classes of this country, we find there everything but what there ought most to be. There are no books in them worth talking of. If a question arises of geography, they have no atlases. If the question be when a great man was born, they cannot help you. They can give you a gorgeous bed, with four posts, marvellous adornments, luxurious hangings, and lacquered shams all round; they can give you dinners ad nauseam, and wine that one can, or cannot, honestly praise. But useful books are almost the last things that are to be found there; and when the mind is empty of those things that books can alone fill it with, then the seven devils of pettiness, frivolity, fashionableness, gentility, scandal, small slander, and the chronicling of small beer come in and take possession. Half this nonsense would be dropped if men would only understand the elevating influences of their communing constantly with the lofty thoughts and high resolves of men of old times.”

The author of “Dreamthorpe,” filled with love and enthusiasm, discourses thus: “I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden’s roses yet lingers in it, while it vibrates only to the world’s first brood of nightingales and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march of Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre,—the stage is time; the play is the play of the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of captives are dragged at the chariot wheels of conquerors! I hiss, or cry ‘Bravo,’ when the great actors come on, shaking the stage. I am a Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shout with Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Assyrian plains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs,—Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob’s guile, Esau’s face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph’s splendid funeral procession, —all these things I find within the boards of my Old Testament. What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopled world,—what bleating of flocks, what green pastoral rest, what indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and war, I hear the bleating of Abraham’s flocks, the tinkling of the bells of Rebekah’s camels. O men and women, so far separated yet so near, so strange yet so well-known, by what miraculous power do I know you all? Books are the true Elysian fields, where the spirits of the dead converse; and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What king’s court can boast such company? What school of philosophy, such wisdom? The wit of the ancient world is glancing and flashing there. There is Pan’s pipe, there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages, they are ghosts. I take one down, and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than did ever Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library; but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees.”

These books of mine, as you well know, are not drawn up here for display, however much the pride of the eye may be gratified in beholding them; they are on actual service.—Southey.

TO assist teachers and scholars, and those who aspire to become such, in making judicious selection of world-famous books for their libraries, I submit the following list, which includes the greater part of all that is the very best and the most enduring in our language. It is not intended to embrace professional works, nor works suited merely for students of specialties. The books named are such as will grace the library of any scholar, no matter what his profession or his preferences; they are books which every teacher ought to know; they are books of which no one can ever feel ashamed. “The first thing naturally, when one enters a scholar’s study or library,” says Holmes, “is to look at his books. One gets a notion very speedily of his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance round his book-shelves.” And, take my word for it, if you want a library of which you will be proud, you cannot be too careful as to the character of the books you put in it.

POETRY.

Chaucer’s Poetical Works, or, if not the complete works, at least the “Canterbury Tales.” In speaking of the great works in English Poetry, it is natural to mention Chaucer first, although, as a general rule, he should be one of the last read. “It is sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty.”—Dryden.

Spenser’s Faerie Queene, not to be read through, but in selections. “We can scarcely comprehend how a perusal of the Faerie Queene can fail to insure to the true believer a succession of halcyon days.”—Hazlitt.

The Works of William Shakspeare. The following editions of Shakspeare have been issued within the present century: The first Variorum (1813); The Variorum (1821); Singer’s (10 vols. 1826); Knight’s (8 vols. 1841); Collier’s (8 vols. 1844); Verplanck’s (3 vols. 1847); Hudson’s (11 vols. 1857); Dyce’s (6 vols. 1867); Mary Cowden Clarke’s (2 vols. 1860); R. G. White’s (12 vols. 1862); Clark and Wright’s (9 vols. 1866); The Leopold Edition (1 vol. 1877); The Harvard Edition (20 vols. 1881); The Variorum (—vols. 1871—); Rolfe’s School Shakspeare (1872-81); Hudson’s School Shakspeare. “Above all poets, the mysterious dual of hard sense and empyrean fancy.”—Lord Lytton.

Ben Jonson’s Dramatic and Poetical Works, to be read also in selections. “O rare Ben Jonson!”

Christopher Marlowe’s Dramatic Works, especially “Tamburlaine,” “Doctor Faustus,” and “The Jew of Malta.” “He had in him all those brave translunary things which the first poets did have.”—Drayton.

Beaumont and Fletcher, and especially “The Faithful Shepherdess,” a play “very characteristic of Fletcher, being a mixture of tenderness, purity, indecency, and absurdity.”—Hallam.

John Webster’s Tragedies. “To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit: this only a Webster can do.”—Charles Lamb.

George Herbert’s Poems. “In George Herbert there is poetry, and enough to spare; it is the household bread of his existence.”—Géorge Macdonald.

Milton’s Poetical Works. The “Paradise Lost” was mentioned in the former list; but you cannot well do without his shorter poems also. “Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him.”—Charles Lamb.

Pope’s Poetical Works. “Come we now to Pope, that prince of sayers of acute and exquisite things.”—Robert Chambers.

Dryden’s Poems. “Dryden is even better than Pope. He has immense masculine energies.”—Ibid.

Goldsmith’s Select Poems. “No one like Goldsmith knew how to be at once natural and exquisite, innocent and wise, a man and still a child.”—Edward Dowden.

The Poems of Robert Burns. “Burns should be my stand-by of a winter night.”—J. H. Morse.

Wordsworth’s Select Poems. “Nearest of all modern writers to Shakspeare and Milton, yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own.”—Coleridge.

the Poems of Sir Walter Scott. “Walter Scott ranks in imaginative power hardly below any writer save Homer and Shakspeare.”—Goldwin Smith.

The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh’ is, as far as I know, the greatest poem which the century has produced in any language.”—Ruskin.

Coleridge’s Select Poems. “The Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” and “Genevieve.” “These might be bound up in a volume of twenty pages, but they should be bound in pure gold.”—Stopford Brooke.

The Poems of John Keats. “No one else in English poetry, save Shakspeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness.”—Matthew Arnold.

The Christian Year, by John Keble. “I am not a churchman,—I don’t believe in planting oaks in flower-pots,—but such a poem as ‘The Rosebud’ makes one a proselyte to the culture it grows from.”—Dr. Holmes.

Tennyson’s Poems. “Tennyson is a born poet, that is, a builder of airy palaces and imaginary castles; he has chosen amongst all forms the most elegant, ornate, exquisite.”—M. Taine.

Longfellow’s Poetical Works. “In the pure, amiable, home-like qualities that reach the heart and captivate the ear, no one places Longfellow second.”—The Critic.

Bryant’s Poetical Works. “The great characteristics of Bryant’s poetry are its strong common-sense, its absolute sanity, and its inexhaustible imagination.”—R. H. Stoddard.

The Poems of John G. Whittier. “The lyric poet of America, his poems are in the broadest sense national.”—Anon.

In addition to the works named above, there are several collections of short poems and selections of poetry invaluable to the student. They are “infinite riches in little room.” I name—

Bryant’s Library of Poetry and Song.

Emerson’s Parnassus.

Ward’s English Poets.

Piatt’s American Poetry and Art.

Appleton’s Library of British Poetry.

Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.

“A large part of what is best worth knowing in ancient literature, and in the literature of France, Italy, Germany, and Spain,” says Lord Macaulay, “has been translated into our own tongue. I would not dissuade any person from studying either the ancient languages or the languages of modern Europe; but I would console those who have not time to make themselves linguists by assuring them that, by means of their own mother tongue, they may obtain ready access to vast intellectual treasures, to treasures such as might have been envied by the greatest linguists of the age of Charles the Fifth, to treasures surpassing those which were possessed by Aldus, by Erasmus, and by Melanchthon.”

I name some of the treasures which you may thus acquire—

Homer’s Iliad. Of this work, without which no scholar’s library is complete, many translations have been made. The most notable are George Chapman’s (1611), Pope’s (1715), Tickell’s (1715), Cowper’s (1781), Lord Derby’s (1867), Bryant’s (1870). Americans will, of course, prefer Bryant’s translation; but Derby’s is more poetical, and the greatest scholars award the palm of merit to Chapman. Says Lowell: “Chapman has made for us the best poem that has yet been Englished out of Homer.”

Æschylus. “Prometheus Bound” has been rendered into English verse by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Agamemnon” has been translated by Dean Milman, and the entire seven tragedies by Dean Potter. “The ‘Prometheus’ is a poem of the like dignity and scope as the Book of Job, or the Norse Edda.”—Emerson.

Aristophanes. The translation by John Hookham Frere is admirable. “We might apply to the pieces of Aristophanes the motto of a pleasant and acute adventurer in Goethe: ‘Mad, but clever.’”—A. W. Schlegel.

Virgil’s Æneid. The best known translations of Virgil are Dryden’s (1697), Christopher Pitt’s (1740), John Conington’s (1870), William Morris’s (1876). Your choice among these will lie between the last two. “Virgil is far below Homer; yet Virgil has genius enough to be two men.”—Lord Lytton.

Horace’s Odes, Epodes, and Satires. There are excellent translations by Conington, Lord Lytton, and T. Martin. “There is Horace, charming man of the world, who will condole with you feelingly on the loss of your fortune, ... but who will yet show you that a man may be happy with a vile modicum or parva rura.”—Ibid.

Dante’s Divina Commedia. Translated by Longfellow. “The finest narrative poem of modern times.”—Macaulay.

Goethe’s Faust. Translated by Bayard Taylor. “What constitutes Goethe’s glory is, that in the nineteenth century he did produce an epic poem—I mean a poem in which genuine gods act and speak.”—H. A. Taine.

Of the best poetry written in the modern foreign tongues, you will have no difficulty in finding excellent translations. There are good English editions of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso; of Calderon and Camoens; of Molière, Corneille, Racine, and Victor Hugo; and of Goethe and Schiller. And to make your collection complete for all the purposes of a scholar, you will want Longfellow’s “Poets and Poetry of Europe,” containing translations of the best short poems written in the modern European languages.

Of modern poetry, John Ruskin advises beginners to “keep to Scott, Wordsworth, Keats, Crabbe, Tennyson, the two Brownings, Lowell, Longfellow, and Coventry Patmore, whose ‘Angel in the House’ is a most finished piece of writing, and the sweetest analysis we possess of quiet modern domestic feeling.... Cast Coleridge at once aside as sickly and useless; and Shelley as shallow and verbose; Byron, until your taste is fully formed, and you are able to discern the magnificence in him from the wrong. Never read bad or common poetry, nor write any poetry yourself; there is, perhaps, rather too much than too little in the world already.”

Says Frederic Harrison: “I am for the school of all the great men; and I am against the school of the smaller men. I care for Wordsworth as well as for Byron, for Burns as well as for Shelley, for Boccaccio as well as for Milton, for Bunyan as well as Rabelais, for Cervantes as much as for Dante, for Corneille as well as for Shakspeare, for Goldsmith as well as Goethe. I stand by the sentence of the world; and I hold that in a matter so human and so broad as the highest poetry, the judgment of the nations of Europe is pretty well settled.... The busy world may fairly reserve the lesser lights for the time when it knows the greatest well.... Nor shall we forget those wonderful idealizations of awakening thought and primitive societies, the pictures of other races and types of life removed from our own: all those primeval legends, ballads, songs, and tales, those proverbs, apologues, and maxims which have come down to us from distant ages of man’s history,—the old idyls and myths of the Hebrew race; the tales of Greece, of the Middle Ages, of the East; the fables of the old and the new world; the songs of the Nibelungs; the romances of early feudalism; the ‘Morte d’Arthur’; the ‘Arabian Nights;’ the ballads of the early nations of Europe.”

PROSE.

In the following list I shall endeavor to name only the truly great and time-abiding books,—books to be used not simply as tools, but for the “building up of a lofty character,” the turning of the soul inward upon itself, concentrating its forces, and fitting it for greater and stronger achievements. They embody the best thoughts of the best thinkers; and almost any one of them, if properly read and “energized upon,” will furnish food for study, and meditation, and mind-growth, enough for the best of us.

Essays, etc.

The Works of Lord Bacon. (Popular edition.) “He seemed to me ever, by his work, one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration, that had been in many ages.”—Ben Jonson.

Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne. “One of the most beautiful prose poems in the language.”—Lord Lytton.

The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton. Byron says that “if the reader has patience to go through the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ he will be more improved for literary conversation than by the perusal of any twenty other works with which I am acquainted.”

Montaigne’s Essays. (Best edition.) “Montaigne comes in for a large share of the scholar’s regard; opened anywhere, his page is sensible, marrowy, quotable.”—A. Bronson Alcott.

Areopagitica, by John Milton. “A sublime treatise, which every statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand and as frontlets between his eyes.”—Macaulay.

The Spectator. “The talk of Addison and Steele is the brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print.”—John Richard Green.

Burke’s Orations and Political Essays. “In amplitude of comprehension and richness of imagination, Burke was superior to every orator, ancient or modern.”—Lord Macaulay.

Webster’s Best Speeches. “But after all is said, we come back to the simple statement that he was a very great man; intellectually, one of the greatest men of his age.”—Henry Cabot Lodge.

The Orations of Demosthenes. A good translation is that of Kennedy in Bohn’s Classical Library.

Cicero’s Orations; also Cicero’s Offices, Old Age, Friendship, etc.

Plutarch’s Lives. Arthur Hugh Clough’s revision of Dryden’s Plutarch. “Without Plutarch, no library were complete.”—A. Bronson Alcott.

The Six Chief Lives from Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, edited by Matthew Arnold.

Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. “Scarcely since the days of Homer has the feat been equalled; indeed, in many senses, this also is a kind of heroic poem.”—Carlyle.

Charles Lamb’s Essays. “People never weary of reading Charles Lamb.”—Alexander Smith.

Carlyle’s Works. “No man of his generation has done as much to stimulate thought.”—Alfred Guernsey.

Macaulay’s Essays. “I confess to a fondness for books of this kind.”—H. A. Taine.

Froude’s Short Studies on Great Subjects. “Models of style and clear-cut thought.”—Anon.

The Works of Washington Irving. “In the department of pure literature the earliest classic writer of America.”

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. “Something more than an essayist; he is contemplative, discursive, poetical, thoughtful, philosophical, amusing, imaginative, tender—never didactic.”—Mackenzie.

Emerson’s Essays. “A diction at once so rich and so homely as his, I know not where to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like home-spun cloth-of-gold.”—J. R. Lowell.

FICTION.

The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented.

Sir John Herschel.

Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them,—almost all women; a vast number of clever, hard-headed men, judges, bishops, chancellors, mathematicians, are notorious novel-readers, as well as young boys and sweet girls, and their kind, tender mothers.

W. M. Thackeray.

Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. “‘Robinson Crusoe’ contains (not for boys, but for men) more religion, more philosophy, more psychology, more political economy, more anthropology, than are found in many elaborate treatises on these special subjects.”—F. Harrison.

Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Cervantes. “The work of Cervantes is the greatest in the world after Homer’s Iliad, speaking of it, I mean, as a work of entertainment.”—Dr. Johnson.

Gulliver’s Travels, by Dean Swift. “Not so indispensable, but yet the having him is much to be rejoiced in.”—R. Chambers.

The Vicar of Wakefield, by Goldsmith. “The blotting out of the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ from most minds, would be more grievous than to know that the island of Borneo had sunk in the sea.”—Ibid.

The Waverley Novels. If not all, at least the following: Ivanhoe; The Talisman; Kenilworth; The Monastery; The Abbot; Old Mortality; The Antiquary; Guy Mannering; The Bride of Lammermoor; The Heart of Midlothian.

Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales.

Dickens’s Novels. Not all, but the following: David Copperfield; Dombey and Son; Nicholas Nickleby; Old Curiosity Shop; Oliver Twist; and The Pickwick Papers.

Thackeray’s Novels. Vanity Fair; Pendennis; The Newcomes; The Virginians; Henry Esmond.

George Eliot’s Novels. Adam Bede; The Mill on the Floss; Romola; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda.

Corinne, by Madame de Staël.

Telemachus, by Fénelon. (Hawkesworth’s translation.)

Tom Jones, by Fielding. “We read his books as we drink a pure, wholesome, and rough wine, which cheers and fortifies us, and which wants nothing but bouquet.”—H. A. Taine.

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, by Goethe. (Carlyle’s translation.)

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Novels. The Scarlet Letter; The Marble Faun; The Blithedale Romance; The House of Seven Gables.

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo.

Hypatia and Alton Locke, by Charles Kingsley.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Mrs. Stowe. “We have seen an American woman write a novel of which a million copies were sold in all languages, and which had one merit, of speaking to the universal heart, and was read with equal interest to three audiences, namely, in the parlor, in the kitchen, and in the nursery of every house.”—Emerson.

Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain.

Bulwer-Lytton’s Novels. The Caxtons; My Novel; Zanoni; The Last of the Barons; Harold; The Last Days of Pompeii.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë.

John Halifax, Gentleman, by Mrs. Craik.

This list might be readily extended; but I forbear, resolved rather to omit some meritorious works than to include any that are unworthy of the best companionship.

I close this chapter with Leigh Hunt’s pleasant word-picture descriptive of his own library: “Sitting last winter among my books, and walled round with all the comfort and protection which they and my fireside could afford me,—to wit, a table of high-piled books at my back, my writing-desk on one side of me, some shelves on the other, and the feeling of the warm fire at my feet,—I began to consider how I loved the authors of those books; how I loved them too, not only for the imaginative pleasures they afforded me, but for their making me love the very books themselves, and delight to be in contact with them. I looked sideways at my Spenser, my Theocritus, and my Arabian Nights; then above them at my Italian Poets; then behind me at my Dryden and Pope, my Romances, and my Boccaccio; then on my left side at my Chaucer, who lay on my writing-desk; and thought how natural it was in Charles Lamb to give a kiss to an old folio, as I once saw him do to Chapman’s Homer.... I entrench myself in my books, equally against sorrow and the weather. If the wind comes through a passage, I look about to see how I can fence it off by a better disposition of my movables; if a melancholy thought is importunate, I give another glance at my Spenser. When I speak of being in contact with my books, I mean it literally. I like to be able to lean my head against them.... The very perusal of the backs is a ‘discipline of humanity.’ There Mr. Southey takes his place again with an old Radical friend; there Jeremy Collier is at peace with Dryden; there the lion, Martin Luther, lies down with the Quaker lamb, Sewell; there Guzman d’Alfarache thinks himself fit company for Sir Charles Grandison, and has his claims admitted.... Nothing, while I live and think, can deprive me of my value for such treasures. I can help the appreciation of them while I last, and love them till I die; and perhaps I may chance, some quiet day, to lay my over-beating temples on a book, and so have the death I most envy.”